Gates Gets It Right About Steve Jobs, Microsoft (Premium)

In an interview with CNN this past weekend, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looked back on Steve Jobs, a sometime collaborator and a sometime competitor. And unlike the recent interview in which he incorrectly called Android his biggest mistake, this time he got it right.

“Next completely failed, it was such nonsense, and yet he mesmerized those people,” Gates said of the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple in the mid-1980s.

He’s right: Jobs ran Next into the ground and that business was a failure. It was, however, saved by a dying Apple, which needed a more modern base for its next Mac operating system. And then Jobs came back to Apple, took over as CEO, and engineered the biggest turnaround in business history.

Gates addresses a number of things related to Jobs, including his so-called “reality distortion field,” which Gates said never affected him.

“I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I’m a minor wizard, the spells don’t work on me,” Gates said, in perhaps the most awkward possible way of saying that. Here, too, he was correct: When asked whether he would develop software for Jobs’ Next computer, Gates said (and I quote),” Develop for it? I’ll piss on it.”

But Jobs was, of course, a motivating technology innovator. And Gates’ assessment of what Jobs got right is, again, correct.

“I have yet to meet any person who [could rival Jobs] in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent, and having a sense of design of, ‘Oh, this is good. This is not good,’ he said.

Jobs, too, was terrible to virtually everyone he’d ever met, including members of his own family. That falls under my theory about geniuses, or anyone who is a bit too good at any one thing: They suffer elsewhere. Gates calls Jobs an “asshole,” correctly, and explains that it’s easy to “imitate the bad parts of Steve,” as countless people have tried, from Steven Sinofsky to Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes. “But “he brought some incredibly positive things along with that toughness,” Gates added. Correct.

But what I like the most about this interview is that Gates seems to have taken my criticism of his last interview to heart. As you may recall, Gates said that his biggest mistake at Microsoft was not creating Android. But as I noted in No, Bill. No (Premium), that’s nonsense. Bill Gates’ biggest mistake was creating a culture in which the firm would never innovate, but would instead copy the best ideas and then illegally push those the businesses that did create those ideas right out of the market.

“The problem with Microsoft … is that the company’s early history is tainted,” I wrote. “And it’s tainted because of Bill Gates and his lack of ethics and empathy, his inability to innovate, and the culture he infused into the company he created. Microsoft today is trying to shake all that off. But it came ...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC